[ExI] stock sales on legal cases

[spike at rainier66.com]

I am not a lawyer, but our Big Rip discussion has me thinking overtime in
overdrive.

 

If one hangs out on Quora or any of the other social commentary sites, one
can get a good amateur-level education in anything, including law, with
commentary by lawyers offered free.

 

Although I didn't see anyone suggest it, an idea occurred to me.  A case
comes up where a big rich cherry-red lawsuit target does something to harm a
penniless nobody, perhaps a news agency singling out a child with a
questionable story.  Now a lawyer agrees to represent the child in a lawsuit
for a contingency, nothing if he gets nothing, a third of the take if he
wins (I think that is a common standard today.)

 

OK then.

 

Suppose a case is being watched by a lot of people.  The lawyer who takes
the case is gambling: he still has to pay his people.  But we can think of a
payoff matrix: the lawyer might make yakkity yak dollars in such and such
years from now, or bla bla dollars in urka urk years from now, etc.  Create
a payoff matrix, cross product with time to payoff matrix, get a present
worth vector which can be (in an engineering sense) reduced to a scalar.  We
can (kinda sorta) claim that a client this lawyer just took on is "worth"
(in a sense) a specific number of present-day dollars, based on one's
estimated payout and time matrices.  Ja?

 

OK, the law firm might go broke before the case is adjudicated, so if we
have a law firm with a (scalar) net worth of say 30 million bucks but has no
income (because the 30 million figure is predicated on his entire firm
working that case) and a 2 million a year payroll, then the probability of
that firm going under before it gets its potential pay is considerable.

 

What if. there was a way (or perhaps there already is a way) to buy the
equivalent of stock in a law firm?  Investors can keep the firm afloat and
keep its staff paid while they work on the case.  That would create a money
equivalent to the breezy verbiage on Quora where people are guessing at the
value of a civil case.

 

Law hipsters among us please: can a person buy stock in a law firm?

 

spike

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20190311/96504225/attachment.html>